Staying Where I'm At

After looking at all of the areas in which instructional technology is prevalent (military, healthcare, higher education, etc.), I see myself staying where I am, in the P-12 education environment, specifically, at the elementary level.

I currently am the technology facilitator at a P-5 school and really do see it as the place where I intend to stay with my degree.  Elementary school has always been the area to quickly recognize the changes of society and adapt to them.  Maybe it's because we get them first, and don't get much of a buffer zone.  However, because of this, we constantly are asking ourselves what is needed to stay relevant to our students.  I feel this is especially evident when it comes to technology and it's use in education.  The trends and technologies we begin to use and follow in early education move with our students as they proceed through the system.

The district I work in now, recently has made technology a priority.  However, even with its importance in the district, I see that the elementary schools are the ones that seem to be a little bit ahead of the middle and high schools.  Even the role of the technology facilitator (TF) is very different among elementary, middle, and high schools.  The way things are now, our elementary TFs are the ones that seem to be most immersed in the instructional design process with a lot of focus on curriculum and incorporating technology.  With the size of our middle schools and high schools, the TFs at that level tend to spend the majority if their time troubleshooting technology issues and training staff (although some are doing an awesome job to change this).  While we do these things also at the elementary level, we also have a lot of opportunity to design lessons for teachers, model lessons, and interact with students, and this is the part of the job that I enjoy most.

In a perfect world, one where education has lots of money and all of the resources that are needed, TFs would spend their time working with students and teachers and guiding them in the instructional design process.  We would have several technology specialists at each school, some focusing on design and media, others focusing on media repair, some focusing on staff development, and still others to take on the many other facets of instructional technology.  Since this is not the case, I like working at the elementary level, because it allows me to focus more on the aspects of instructional technology that appeal to me.

I do not have a lot of questions about the current environment I work in (I'm so new to the job, I'm still don't even know enough to even know what exactly I don't know).   However, I do question the future of my job in schools.  As I stated above, ideally, there really needs to be multiple people that focus on instructional technology at each school.  With the increase of the need for "21st Century Skills" and the gap continuing to widen between students and staff in perception of technology, I don't see schools as being able to keep up with instructional technology if things stay the way are.  With the limited amount of resources, personnel, and funding given to the area at the present time, I don't feel it can keep up with the changes. I am very interested to see what instructional technology will like like on our schools in the very near future, and am excited to be a part of it.

Instructional Media and Me

The instructional media that I am most interested in currently is the interactive white board (we use both ActivBoards and SMART at our school).  Four years ago I had the opportunity to be the first teacher at our school with an Activboard and I have been all for them ever since. Now as the technology facilitator, a big portion of my job at the time is focused on training teachers to use this media and helping them create lessons and units that are complimented by their boards.  What I love most about Activ/SMART Boards is that it is simply a way to control computer software and navigate through the world wide web in a large scale setting.  Web 2.0 tools is the other media I am currently obsessed with, and I love how the SMART Board can be used to instruct learnings on how to use various web 2.0 tools as well as present their final products to an audience.

Our school currently has about 16 classrooms equipped with boards.  The biggest obstacle I am currently facing is training teachers to use the boards as tool to help facilitate learning, instead of as an electronic whiteboard to help with lectures.  My lead teacher and I have been conducting staff development where we are incorporating interactive white board training into the content.  For example, two weeks ago we worked with each grade level in 3 hour workshops focused on science.  Four of my six  5th grade teachers are equipped with ActivBoards.  They currently do an amazing job facilitating  inquiry based science instruction.  With such a firm foundation in the instructional methods, we were able to spend our three hours looking at the inquiry based teaching approach and seeing how we could incorporate their Activboards effectively into their instruction.  The teachers began to create multimedia powerpoint presentations, put videos together, and create an electronic Science Notebook, that could help them model correct notebooking procedures.  It was pretty amazing to for me to see the teachers gather and create so much media that could be delivered via their boards.  I guided the process, but they really understood their teaching objectives and did an amazing job of using the media to enhance their teaching.  They really were true users of instructional technology.

In the future, eventually all of our classrooms will be equipped with boards and I see it becoming more difficult to make sure that the technology is used with best teaching practices.  A lot of teachers continue to do things the way they have always done them, so it will take some work to guide them to look at the ADDIE process and the most effective teaching practices.  Even more difficult, will be working with the teachers who want nothing to do with interactive white boards (I have converted one, but I have about 5 to go!).  It is becoming an expected way of delivering instruction at our school, so I hope to bring them along and get them to understand and take advantage of the ease of the media, instead of them being forced to use media they don't want to.  However, I believe that is our duty to teach students with 21st century technology and meet them at their level.  I hope to spread that passion and belief to our teachers so that they embrace the interactive white boards and the methods of teaching that should be used with it.